NASA, Computer Model Shows a Disk Galaxys Life History

This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13. 5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300, 000 lightyears across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. , and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter. Credit: F. Governato and T. Quinn (Univ. of Washington), A. Brooks (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), and J. Wadsley (McMaster This video is public domain and can be downloaded here: Like our videos Subscribe to NASA s Goddard Shorts HD podcast: